


The Before

by LockedOnJohn



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Natasha Feels, Natasha Needs a Hug, natasha origin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-12 21:16:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12968589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LockedOnJohn/pseuds/LockedOnJohn
Summary: Natasha is seven when she fires her first gun.Snapshots of a young Natasha Romanoff-- Before the Avengers, before S.H.I.E.L.D., before Clint





	The Before

Natasha’s earliest memory is of when she was three. She watches her mother boil a pot over the flames of the stove. Her mother smiles down and offers a spoonful of whatever it is she is cooking. Natasha readily accepts. She does not remember the taste, but she does remember the way the flame scorched the pot. She is five when she finds out fires aren’t just for cooking.

She watches her parents burn in the flames that are red as her hair. She feels the heat radiate from the building and from the hand of the man clutching her shoulder. “You are to come with me,” he says. His voice floats away like the embers from the roof. The building collapses. Natasha looks at the man, tears cutting through the black soot, revealing flush red cheeks. The man does not look back, but instead keeps his gaze fixed on the building. There are no more screams. “Come,” he says, and she does.

-

Natasha is seven when she fires her first gun. She shoots a target that is the silhouette of a man. The bullet would have hit him right between the eyes had he any. A year later, when she’s perfected her aim beyond beginner’s luck, she makes the same shot, but instead of smoke and shreds of paper, blood and flecks of brain matter splatter the floor. If her handlers showed affection, she would have been showered in praise. But they don’t, and she wasn’t. They simply nod and beat the next girl who fails to shoot the target between the eyes.

-

Natasha is twelve when she realizes she might have left the fire but the fire never left her. When she kills a girl during a sparring match, she knows in another life she would feel remorse- heartbreak even. But Natasha only feels triumphant. She is efficient and assumes her handlers know that. They accelerate her program and the next day she spars with a girl nearly twice her size and four years older. Natasha almost dies. She hears the bones in her face crack. She bleeds. She bruises. She grunts in pain. But she does not cry.

The next day she is brought back to her group. Her arm is in a sling, her face is scabbed and bruised. Both her eyes are black and her lip is swollen. She has at least four broken ribs and she hasn’t been able to keep down food since before the match. She still tastes blood in her mouth. She is a mess, but she is alive. Unfortunately she is an example. Do not stray from the pack. Do not show off. Do not disobey.

The next time she is paired with a girl, it is someone who craves to avenge the girl Natasha killed. She fights with tears in her eyes and rage in her heart. They struggle, but Natasha gains the upper hand. With her hands around the girl’s throat, Natasha feels a sense of control. Once she decides to let go, Natasha realizes those are the only decisions she’ll ever control. The girl is not dead, merely unconscious under Natasha’s own twisted brand of mercy. The adrenaline finds a home in her belly, and Natasha can feel the fire inside her grow. It reminds her that she will always suffer, even in victory. It reminds her rage is not a weapon. It’s a direction.

-

Natasha is sixteen when she feels the naked body of a man under her own, and not long after that, a woman’s. She is taught that sex is clinical—merely a means to an end, like a bullet or a bomb. Sex, unlike rage, can be weaponized, and Natasha is very well-trained in handling weapons. Her lips speak in tragic tongues that lure lesser men into her web. She wraps silken words around their necks until they find comfort in strangulation. As the threads tighten, they begin to realize the honey in her eyes has spoiled despite all of evidence that it is not possible. The sweet sugar taste of her skin turns sour and they panic, realizing it’s too late. They’ve already been poisoned, captured by the Black Widow.

The Widow kills her marks before they finish because they don’t deserve the pleasure.

Natasha kills her marks before she finishes because there is no pleasure to deserve.

-

Natasha is eighteen when they cut it all out of her. Initially, she feels empty, but the feeling passes. Her father read her Beowulf once, and she remembers a monster mother with her monster child, and Natasha can’t even think of bringing a life into this cruel and tired world only for someone dressed in armor and arrogance to take it away with his sword.

But the truth is, she would have never had a child anyway. She can’t imagine bringing life to anything but blood-stained demons with razor teeth and claws, because Natasha was never destined to be a mother. She was destined to be a wolf.

-

Natasha is twenty (On the dot. Her watch flashes “12:00” and she does not give it a second glance) when she considers for the first time she might have been a good mother, had everything been different. But it is not different, she reconciles, and it is a waste of time to dwell on things that cannot be.

She thinks of how she cannot be anything other than the Widow. She thinks of how she’s sealed her fate in blood and fire. She thinks of the men and women she’s killed, and she refuses to think about the children. She can never think about the children.

She swallows these thoughts and aims her gun at the archer.

-

Natasha is twenty years, one hour, forty minutes, and seven seconds old when she rips an arrow out of her shoulder and runs into a warehouse in hopes of shaking the archer from her trail. Her bullet scraped the juncture between his neck and shoulder as he ducked away from her fire. A painful wound, but not fatal.

Her shoulder is bleeding, and she can feel the echoes of her heartbeat as it pumps fresh blood through her body and out the hole in her arm. It is only at times like these, where her body is screaming in pain, that she remembers she has a heartbeat at all.

She spares no time in refocusing her energy at the archer. She is ready to shoot again, this time she won’t miss. She hears the faint clink of metal—he’s nocking an arrow—and she directs her gun to the rafters. She wastes no time in firing off three bullets. He fires three arrows. They miss her by inches, landing at her feet.

Then they explode.

Her ears are ringing and her eyes are watering from the smoke. She can hear him jumping down to engage her. She places her gun into its holster and removes two daggers.

The archer steps through the smoke, and Natasha smiles, seeing that he was indeed hit with another one of her bullets—his right arm. Natasha always preferred hand-to-hand combat. It was infinitely more intimate, and for someone who spent a lifetime being punished for even thinking about experiencing such a concept, Natasha relishes in the sounds of staccato breaths, the feeling of flesh meeting flesh, the smell of sweat and fear and suppressed ecstasy. She was trained to be amused by meaningless gestures of self-preservation. And in the throes of combat, she truly does bask in the high of being near another human. It is in the moments after that those feelings crumble away to reveal how desperately lonely and unmade she has allowed herself to become.

Natasha isn’t afforded the complexities of victory, though, because in the heat of the struggle, a small, nearly undetectable disc the archer attached to the back of her suit begins to buzz with electricity. She feels it charge, and before she can rip it off, the man detonates the button, sending a surge of electricity through her entire body.

As she hits the ground she thinks about how nice dying feels. For once in her short and tragic life, the weight she’s carried lifts, and the fog of deception and pain clears. Her head cracks on the concrete of the floor and she’s grateful that it will be her only punishment. There will be no consequences. She closes her eyes for what she believes will be the last time and says a silent prayer. She asks to be delivered. She asks to be forgiven. She knows that it is asking a lot, and perhaps she is arrogant for even considering she’s praying to a benevolent God, but she says it anyway. As her eyes close, she feels the hands of the archer grab her shoulders and she thinks to herself how nice it feels to be touched and not have it followed by pain.

-

Natasha is twenty-one (On the dot. Her watch flashes “12:00” and she takes an extra few seconds to stare at the number) and she is sitting on the rooftop of an American-made building with an American-made man. She takes a swig of cheap, American-made vodka and passes the bottle to Clint. It takes her an entire year since being taken to S.H.I.E.L.D., the pain of retraining her brain to disobey the commands and the instincts that have been rooted deep in her subconscious, the pain of proving her worth to not only a panel of people who had planned on her extermination, but also to herself, and the pain of facing herself and realizing she is her only true demon, before she begins to feel thankful.

It takes an entire year before she realizes her prayer was answered.


End file.
